And Now a Word From Our Director

GQ: We've been overdosing on World War II for something like 10 years. What do you hope The War will add to our understanding

Ken Burns: I hope to unwrap the Second World War from the bloodless, gallant myth it's been bogged down in. We forget to actually find out what it was like to be in that battle. I love Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan. I think they're incredibly great. At the same time, they're dramas. Believe it or not, an ungodly number of our graduating highschool seniors think we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War. So there's some work to do.

I know you don't like the term 'The Good War.' How about Brokaw's label, 'The Greatest Generation'

I think you have to take it with a grain of salt. We live in such a dialectically preoccupied culture that in everything you see is so simplistically good or bad, up or down, the greatest or the worst. I yearn for an art that is actually able to transcend that a little bit. In the course of the film, there are moments when the lines between the good guys and the bad guys are blurred almost—almost—to indistinction.

How compulsive were you about making sure your battle footage is specific to the campaign and location you're portraying

We were ultimate sticklers. In so many documentaries, the footage is used like Broll, because you're just illustrating a script and you're not exploring the nuances of moment, of place, of being. And I think this is a huge, huge thing that keeps us from understanding what went on there. Every person who's ever faced combat knows that when violent death is possible at any moment—any moment—everything is vivified. War sets us vibrating in such extraordinarily difficult and dangerous ways that we have to start paying attention to it in a way that goes beyond this mythologizing, so that, if we're gonna have another one, we ought to be damn sure it's the right one. And a necessary one.

The young GI at the end is your father, but you keep him anonymous. Why

He just seemed to be, you know, exactly who went off. The only reason you can fight wars is that you can get teenagers and early twentysomethings to believe this could actually be fun. They have a sense of their own immortality and indestructibility, so you take these naïve children and you send them off.

It's very moving when you show us Paul Fussell breaking down as he talks about the death camps.

I think he just accessed that 19yearold, and then he was back there. We think of memory as being about the distant past, when in fact it's present on our hard drive and instantly and immediately accessible. Quentin Aanenson's twists in his cheeks are there because, man, he's fighting. He's pulling that joystick and pressing that button and tearing Germans in half, you know, every single night.

You obviously decided not to talk to more famous veterans of the war—Bob Dole or Norman Mailer, say, or the late Kurt Vonnegut.

Definitely didn't want to, no. With the exception of [Daniel] Inouye, who ninety percent of people might not recognize and not know. He's just some kid who happens to be picking up dead bodies in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, and works his way into the army and through the war, and only in the last episode do [we] reward the viewer's attention with his fate.

Will people be surprised by how much attention you give not just the JapaneseAmerican story, but the AfricanAmerican one

[Slavery] is our original sin. If you know anything about my other work, I've spent my entire professional life sort of holding our country's feet to the fire for this. What is at the beating heart of the joyous aspect of American history, if not a strange and complicated dance with African Americans And the JapaneseAmerican dimension of it only increases the stuff. I can't do the Second World War without telling these stories.

But you didn't include anything about our racist wartime propaganda against the Japanese.

We fooled around with it, but we found that more stunningly effective than showing the bucktoothed, squintyeyed cartoons was the testimony of some of the people you'd grown to trust the most. It puts you in an uncomfortable situation, allowing a much more subtle insinuation of that racism by the people we've grown to love and know. It's better when Katharine [Phillips] delivers that kind of bad news, if you will.

Because we like her so much.

She's so, so, so great, and I love her, I really do. I mean, in a funny way, this film is about love, which is such an embarrassing thing to say. Because war is the opposite of that. I think we struggle, most of the time, to just figure out a way to enlarge our family—enlarge the circle of intimacy. And these people do it for us; we get to know them in a way that helps us as human beings. At least they did it for me as a filmmaker.

Did you feel any hesitation about focusing just on America's war

I felt that you could find a universality in these four towns—not just an American universality, but a human universality. When we went to Cannes, I thought, my God, what [will] they see in this But people were weeping at the end. We told our story, and yet there was something fundamentally familiar to the people in that audience. And I just thought, you know, we did it.

And Americana has always been your subject.

When you say 'Americana,' I cringe, because I think nostalgia and sentimentality are the enemies of any good history, and we really try to avoid it. I'm interested in a higher emotional intelligence here that's sort of hard to pin down, like soap in a bathtub. But when it descends into nostalgia or sentimentality, I'm history. I'm checked out. I'm gone.

I think you've got this unbelievable monomaniac in MacArthur, who abandoned his guys in Bataan, and the soldiers hated him. Then again, you've got another maniac in Patton, who comes off really well because his soldiers adored him. So I think what you're seeing is a kind of osmosis from the firstperson testimony.

At your age, you probably grew up surrounded by gungho war movies and war comics. Was there a lot of clutter you had to get out of your head

Yeah, I had that. I was digging trenches in the backyard, to my mother's dismay, and fighting the Germans with my Thompson submachine gun. And I had to lose all that. In fact, the four towns become a way not only for the audience to begin with a blank slate, but for us as filmmakers. I mean, your first thought of a Northeastern town isn't Waterbury. [That] permitted us to come in and begin to shed all of that acquired World War Two baggage, and pay homage, still, to a country that was not as dialectically preoccupied as we are now. There were no red states or blue states. Everybody had their oars in the water, pulling in the same direction for the most part.

We usually visualize the war in black and white. Where did all the color footage come from

We found, interestingly enough, that a lot of the stuff that comes down to us as black and white was in fact color, and made black and white for the final newsreel stories. [But] we didn't want to call attention to it. We just fluidly tried to move between black and white and color, because it reminded you this wasn't a safe, arm'slength war. The blood was red just like ours is red. You suddenly get shocked awake, I think. We found lots of, you know, just brutal footage that has been kept off the sanitized History Channel. We just [felt] it was important to put you at the edge of enough. I don't think we ever did too much. We just wanted to put you uncomfortably there.

What about things you left out

You saw the movie Amadeus—'too many notes.' What's left on the cuttingroom floor is not bad stuff, but stuff that just doesn't fit. It's not because it's not good or important or relevant. When you're doing an epic poem, you can't be an encyclopedia or a textbook.

When you were working on this, were you affected by any parallels to Iraq

We began this before September 11th, way before the Iraq war. So this film does not have a political bone in its body. We just know that when you cover war, it will speak to all wars. Only the first Gulf War convinced us, I think to our unbelievable peril, that you could have a casualtyless war, and part of the reason why I think we're in this one is that we thought we could do it on the cheap. We forgot the lesson of Vietnam, of Korea, of the Second World War, of the First World War, of the SpanishAmerican War, of the Civil War—in all of human history, not just American experience—that war is, as William Tecumseh Sherman said, hell.

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